Description
| Daphnis was born in Greece in 1914 and emigrated to the United States at the age of sixteen. Without formal artistic education, he began to exhibit his landscapes based on mythological or religious themes in 1938. His career was interrupted from 1942 to 1946 by military service during World War II. In the army he learned to use a spray gun to paint camouflage patterns on trucks, and this would influence his sense of scale and the technique of his later work.(1) Immediately following his discharge, he painted landscapes whose bleakness reflected his war experiences. In 1951 Daphnis's work changed radically, a transformation that he attributes to a visit to Greece in 1950. Impressed by the intense light of the region, which eliminates detail and flattens forms,(2) he abandoned his amorphous, organic shapes for simplified planes of color; by 1952 he further reduced his color scheme and began using geometric forms. Thus, just as gestural Abstract Expressionism was gaining prominence in the art world, Daphnis was turning to the geometric abstraction of Piet Mondrian. In 1955 Daphnis developed a personal color theory. He visualized pictorial space as comprised of a hundred recessive planes and assigned numbers to these planes. The depth positions of the numbered planes corresponded to pure, unmodulated colors. Black, the color that he observed as being closest to the surface, corresponded to planes 0-10; blue, 10-20; red, 20-50; yellow, 60-90; and white, his most recessive color, 90-100. Expanding upon this theory, he selected particular colors to symbolize various phases of human life, for example, correlating black with birth and white with death.(3) Daphnis's later paintings, such as 2-68, consist of complicated juxtapositions of undulating bands of color that exemplify the systematic application of his color theory. Reproduction of this image, including downloading, is prohibited without written permission from the Artists Rights Society, 536 Broadway, 5th Floor, New York, NY 10112. Tel: 212.420.9160; e-mail info@arsny.com . |
Details
- Work Date:
- 1968
- Location:
- South Concourse
- Dimensions:
- 7'-0" x 7'-0"
- Medium:
- epoxy paint on canvas